For dark drama and drought tolerance, pair Ceanothus Tuxedo with these perfect companion plantings

As those mailorder gardening catalogs start flooding in over the next few weeks, it’s easy to get caught up in the beauty shots of each new plant, all by itself.

What’s difficult, however, is visualing how to use these new introductions as part of drought-tolerant plant combinations that give you dramatic flowers, fantastic foliage AND a low-maintenance garden.

That’s where this series of posts comes in, on Tesselaar’s new plant introductions for 2010. I’ve hunted down some fantastic companion plants for each of them, along with a few design ideas in general, all with easy-care, as well as design ideas, for each new plant - all of them designed with easy-care gardening in mind.

Today, the focus is Ceanothus Tuxedo^® (far left image and lower right corner in collage, at right).

The first-ever black-leaved ceanothus, or California lilac, Tuxedo’s fall-blooming shrub’s lavender-blue flowers absolutely pop out at you from from their dark, dramatic backdrop of purplish-black foliage. The extremely drought-tolerant selection, which grows 8’ high by 6’ wide, is also able to handle a windy slope and well-behaved when it comes to pruning.

Drought-tolerant design idea

Here’s a drought-tolerant fall combo (left) suggested in an Oct. 13, 2009 post on the “Daily Dirt” blog (at http://ow.ly/uliN) by Pacific Coast Home & Garden, the premier garden, home décor and hardware store on the Central Coast. In the image above, in the top right corner, are the following plants, clockwise from the top right corner: ‘Helena’s Blush’, Flax Lily ‘Little Rev’, Correa ‘Wyn’s Wonder’ and Ceanothus Tuxedo.   

Perfect color companions

Amplify the black-and blue theme with other blue fall bloomers like Tesselaar’s Agapanthus Bluestorm™ or any of the 10 blue fall bloomers suggested by About.com garden guide Marie Iannotti. Or, create a complementary color scheme by pairing the lavender-blue Tuxedo blooms with yellow fall bloomers like helenium, beautifully featured by Monica Milla in her Sept. 19, 2008 post titled "Favorite Fall Bloomers" on her gardening blog, Full Bloom (at http://mlive.com/fullbloom).